Download or read book The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion written by Üner Daglier and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The worldwide controversy surrounding its first publication in 1988 and concurrent death threat against its author, Salman Rushdie, paradoxically led to a narrow understanding of The Satanic Verses, which focused on whether it is insulting to Islam and whether it should be banned. And despite piecemeal attention to its epistemic intricacies by students of postcolonial literature in the aftermath, The Satanic Verses’ essential opacity has never been sufficiently met. The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion now responds to this gap through painstakingly detailed attention to the totality of Rushdie’s text. Indeed it uniquely approaches The Satanic Verses’ attempt to mythicize race and migration, on the one hand, and secularize religion and Islam, on the other, from a perspective informed by the perennial debate on religion and politics, esoteric or coded writing in the history of political thought, especially in times of persecution, and Islamic criticism in contemporary world literature. Üner Daglier’s findings accord with another layer of interpretation that emphasizes Rushdie’s across-the-board critique of racial prejudice, penchant for cultural eclecticism, and bitterly skeptical treatment of the foundations of Submission and proposal for feminist Islamic reform, as the antidote for entrenched misogyny, in a world where philosophy is for the rare and religion for the many. They further convey Rushdie’s constant preoccupation with the nature of miracles and postmodern case for intersubjectivity as a criterion for openness to their validity.

Download or read book Writing British Muslims written by Rehana Ahmed and published by . This book was released on 2017-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rushdie affair, September 11 2001 and 7/7 pushed British Muslims into the forefront of increasingly fraught debate about multiculturalism. Stereotyping images have proliferated, reducing a heterogeneous minority group to a series of media soundbites. This book examines contemporary literary representations of Muslims by British writers of South Asian Muslim descent - including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali and Nadeem Aslam - to explore the contribution they make to urgent questions about multicultural politics and the place of Muslims within Britain. By focusing on class, and its intersection with faith, 'race' and gender in identity- and community-formation, it challenges the dichotomy of secular freedom versus religious oppression that constrains thinking about British Muslims, and offers a more nuanced perspective on multicultural debates and controversies.

Download or read book God Is Not Great written by Christopher Hitchens and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2008-11-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

Download or read book Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand written by Aaron Weinacht and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America argues that the core commitments of the nihilist movement of the 1860’s made their way to 20th century America via the thought of Ayn Rand. While mid-nineteenth-century Russian nihilism has generally been seen as part of a radical tradition that culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the author argues that nihilism’s intellectual trajectory was in fact quite different. Analysis of such sources as Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What is to Be Done? (1863) and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), archival research in Rand’s papers, and broad attention to late-nineteenth century Russian intellectual history all lead the author to conclude that nihilism’s legacy is deeply implicated in one of America’s most widely-read philosophers of capitalism and libertarian freedom.

Download or read book Politics Literature and Film in Conversation written by Matthew D. Dinan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a series of essays in honor of noted scholar of political theory, Mary P. Nichols. The essays reflect Nichols’ pathbreaking work in ancient Greek political thought, as well as her influential treatments of works of literature and film in conversation with political theory. Part I: Conversations Concerning Love and Friendship features essays about the philosophical meaning of human connection and affection. Part II: Conversations Between Politics and Poetry looks at the political significance of art, and the ways in which political rule can be understood to be “artistic” or poetic. Part III: Conversations from Tragedy to Comedy considers whether the human need for community is something to be lamented or celebrated. Broad in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, the essays in this volume address authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Mary Wollstonecraft, G.W.F. Hegel, Jane Austen, Henry James, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, as well as the films of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman.

Download or read book Out of a Gray Fog written by Claudia Franziska Bruhwiler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “As to Europe—keep it in a gray, ominous, evil fog.”—Ayn Rand (1905–1982) thus commented on the role of Europe in her key novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The same could be said of the way Europe features in her own biography and in the general perception of her persona. Even though Rand was born in pre-revolutionary Russia, she is nowadays considered anAmerican phenomenon, whose reach ends at the Atlantic shore. This book lifts the "gray fog" cast over her relationship with Europe, retracing the changing perception of the continent in both her fiction and thought. Her apparent lack of success with European readers is often explained by allegedly different reading tastes. However, a look at her publication history and reception shows that many factors played a role why her work found fewer European than US readers. Finally, an archipelago of European readers and admirers emerges which is testament to Rand's impact on European art and politics.

Download or read book Why Moralize upon It written by Brian Danoff and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared that “the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate." The central claim of Why Moralize upon It? is that it is not only statesmen who can help educate a democratic citizenry, but also novelists and filmmakers. This book’s title is drawn from Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” Near the end of this novella, after he has put down a rebellion of enslaved Africans, the American captain Amasa Delano claims that “the past is passed,” and thus there is no need to “moralize upon it.”Melville suggests, though, that it is crucial for Americans to critically examine American history and American political institutions; otherwise, they may be blind to the existence of injustices which will ultimately undermine democracy. Danoff argues that novels and films play a crucial role in helping democratic citizens undertake the kind of moral reflection that they must engage in if they are to not only preserve their political community, but also render it “forever worthy of the saving,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. Contending that some of the most profound American thinking about the nature of democratic leadership has come through novels more so than treatises or essays, Danoff argues that the works of fiction examined in this book explore difficult questions rather than provide any easy answers. Because these works have an ambiguous, nuanced, and tragic outlook, they teach citizen-readers how to think through the moral complexities of the political issues on which they must render judgment. The rich and multi-faceted democratic education that citizens glean from outstanding works of fiction is particularly necessary at a time when the media-landscape is often dominated by superficial “viral moments,” “sound-bites,” and social media posts. Moreover, given that we today live in an era of sharp political polarization in which partisans often demonize one another, it is especially valuable for Americans to be exposed to literary and cinematic works of art which remind us that none of us have a monopoly on virtue, and that all of us inhabit what Melville called “the common continent of men.”

Download or read book Pedagogic Encounters written by Aristi Trendel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-02-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new approach to the genre of the campus novel. Through a critical analysis of eleven novels, Aristi Trendel argues that the specificity and complexity of the pedagogic rapport between professor and student calls for a new genre: the Master-Disciple novel. After the 1980s, the professor-student relationship was highly scrutinized and politicized, making the Master-Disciple novel essential to critical theorists and educators. Furthermore, the Master-Disciple novel broadens the scope of the campus novel as the master-pupil rapport can develop beyond the halls of academia. Though some of the novels analyzed in this book have been thoroughly discussed before, Trendel reads them through the lens of the pedagogic rapport and in constant dialogue with a broad range of themes, such as gender, sexuality, and power. The book will be important for academics, students, and all who are interested in the bond between teacher and student.

Download or read book Between Science and Society written by Douglas A. Van Belle and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Between Science and Society: Charting the Space of Science Fiction, Douglas A. Van Belle uses interviews with 24 science fiction authors to analyze the conceptual space that science fiction occupies between science and society. Using these interviews, Van Belle studies the similarities and differences between the academic and professional understandings of the genre. Between Science and Society arguesthat, for authors, all of the aspects of the genre that are emphasized by academics, such as science communication and depictions of scientists, are secondary to the artistic effort to entertain through storytelling. Through his interviews, Van Belle explores both the genre’s place in relation to science and society and key elements to surviving as a professional science fiction author. Van Belle creates a definition of science fiction based on the creative ideals expressed by these authors and compared to those that arise from the academic perspective, showing that academics are struggling to engage one of the two central ideals of the genre.

Download or read book Philosophical Perspective on Cinema written by Pedro Blas González and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main premise of Philosophical Perspective on Cinema is simple: Can a visual medium such as cinema put in greater perspective diverse aspects of human experience? Films are usually sorted by genres, but by applying metaphysical/existential categories to cinema, the author enables readers to reflect on the nature and essence of existence by making life appear less transparent to itself. Undoubtedly, the connection between sensual reality and philosophical reflection is often glossed over when the emphasis is placed on theoretical abstractions, and not life itself. While this work is a reflection on the philosophy of existence, the author embraces a practical approach to the metaphysical/existential foundation of human existence.

Download or read book The Satanic Verses written by Salman Rushdie and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Download or read book The Tyranny of Silence written by Flemming Rose and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalists face constant intimidation. Whether it takes the extreme form of beheadings, death threats, government censorship or simply political correctness—it casts a shadow over their ability to tell a story. When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad nine years ago, Denmark found itself at the center of a global battle about the freedom of speech. The paper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, defended the decision to print the 12 drawings, and he quickly came to play a central part in the debate about the limitations to freedom of speech in the 21st century. In The Tyranny of Silence, Flemming Rose writes about the people and experiences that have influenced his understanding of the crisis, including meetings with dissidents from the former Soviet Union and ex-Muslims living in Europe. He provides a personal account of an event that has shaped the debate about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy and how to coexist in a world that is increasingly multicultural, multireligious, and multiethnic.

Download or read book Muhammad the Greatest written by and published by Peace Vision. This book was released on 1992 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "And most certainly, thou (O Muhammad) are of most sublime and exalted character." (The Holy Qur’ân, 68:4) How the Topic Arose About ten years ago, a distant cousin of mine - Mr. Mohamed Mehtar Farooki gave me a typed quotation by the French historian, Lamartine. The quotation [A detailed exposition of the quotation will be found on page 38 ] purported to prove that Muhammad (pbuh), the prophet of Islam, was the greatest man that ever lived. Mr. Mehtar was in the habit of passing information on to me, believing that I might put the same to some good use at the proper time and place. Before this he had presented me with "The Call of the Minaret," an expensive book written by (Bishop Kenneth Cragg). By analysing this book I discovered the masterful deceit of the Christian Orientalists.

Download or read book Be Careful with Muhammad written by Shabbir Akhtar and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Blasphemy Insult and Hatred written by European Commission for Democracy through Law and published by Council of Europe. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mutual understanding and acceptance is perhaps the main challenge of modern society. Diversity is undoubtedly an asset, but cohabiting with people of different backgrounds and ideals calls for a new ethic of responsible intercultural relations, in Europe and in the World. This book tries to answer a series of pertinent and poignant questions arising from these issues, such as whether it is still possible to criticise ideas when this may be considered hurtful to certain religious feelings; whether society is hostage to the excessive sensitivity of certain individuals; or what legal responses there may be to these phenomena, and whether criminal law is the only answer.

Download or read book The Great Controversy written by Ellen G. White and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Controversy is a work by Ellen G. White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, considered a prophetess or messenger of God among Seventh-day Adventist members. The book tells about the ever-persistent controversy between the good and the bad, represented by the opposition of Christ and Satan and the forces of angels that accompany them.

Download or read book Joseph Anton written by Salman Rushdie and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Seattle Times • The Economist • Kansas City Star • BookPage On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.” So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph Anton. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom. It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day. Praise for Joseph Anton “A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie’s work throughout his career.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book.”—USA Today “Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie’s ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . [He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written.”—The Independent (UK) “A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty.”—Le Point (France) “Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie’s eye is a camera lens —firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book.”—de Volkskrant (The Netherlands) “One of the best memoirs you may ever read.”—DNA (India) “Extraordinary . . . Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing—at all costs—any curtailment on a writer’s freedom.”—The Boston Globe